Every tenth coffee, without the paper card
The morning rush is the whole business, and anything that adds five seconds to a transaction is something your baristas will quietly stop doing by Thursday. A loyalty scheme in a café has to be faster than the paper card it replaces, not just cheaper.
Start your free trial →Faster than finding the card
The customer is already holding their phone to pay. Pointing it at a QR code on the counter takes about two seconds and happens while the drink is being made, so it lands in the dead time you already have instead of adding to the queue.
Baristas do not have to do anything
There is no button for staff to press, no card to find, no stamp to ink. That matters more than it sounds — loyalty schemes usually die because the person on shift at 8:15am has three drinks going and skips the optional step every single time.
The tenth coffee is actually the tenth
With paper, lost cards and generous re-issues mean the free coffee often arrives on the sixth or seventh visit. Stamps here are counted per customer against your shop, so the reward costs what you decided it would cost when you set the card up.
The economics of a coffee stamp card
A ten-stamp coffee card costs you one drink’s margin roughly every ten visits. Set against that, it moves a customer from “whichever café I pass” to “the one where I have six stamps”. In a street with four cafés, that is often the entire difference between a good week and an average one.
The failure mode is not the free coffee. It is that the card leaks: re-issued cards, generous baristas, and forged stamps mean the real rate ends up nearer one free drink every six or seven. A digital count removes that leak without making staff police anything.
Why the paper card dies in a café specifically
Cafés have the worst possible conditions for paper loyalty cards:
- Transactions are tiny and fast. Any friction is proportionally enormous. Ten seconds of wallet-rummaging on a £3.20 sale is not worth it to either side.
- Wallets are shrinking. A lot of people pay by phone or watch and no longer carry a wallet at all, so there is physically nowhere to put a card.
- Cards get wet. They live in a bag with a water bottle. They do not last the ten visits you are asking of them.
Setting it up
One screen at the counter — a tablet, a spare monitor, or an old phone in a stand — shows a QR code that regenerates after every scan. Customers point their camera at it and the stamp is theirs. Nothing to install on their side, nothing to configure on yours beyond deciding how many stamps earn what.
Setup is three screens: your email, the link we send you, and your shop’s name. The first card is created with sensible defaults already in it.
Cost
$29/month flat. Unlimited stamps and unlimited customers, so a café doing four hundred covers a day pays exactly the same as one doing forty, and there is no per-scan fee to make your busiest hour your most expensive one.
The questions everyone asks
Will this slow down the morning queue?
It should not. The scan happens while the drink is being made rather than at the till, so it runs in parallel with work you are already doing. Nothing is typed, nothing is looked up, and staff do not need to handle the customer's phone at any point.
Can I run different cards for coffee and for lunch?
Yes. Each card is its own stamp scheme, so a ten-coffee card and a separate lunch card can run side by side, and a customer can be part-way through both without the counts interfering with each other.
What about regulars who pay in cash?
It makes no difference. Stamping is not tied to the payment at all — nothing connects to your till or card terminal, so a cash customer scans exactly the same QR code as everyone else and gets exactly the same stamp.
Do customers need to give an email address?
No. A customer can earn stamps with no account at all; the card just lives on their phone. They can optionally link a Google, Facebook or email account later if they want the stamps to survive a new phone, but it is never required to earn one.
$29/month · 7-day free trial
Unlimited stamps · Unlimited customers · No per-scan fees
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